EASTER 2021

Were animals also banished from earthly paradise when humans were banished? Has that question ever been asked? Probably not. Sin is always measured by consciousness. Animals, who were more interested in love than wisdom, did not try to question the definition of good and evil (how Satan lured Adam and Eve into sin? by offering them to establish their own criteria, figuratively speaking, an apple from the Tree of Knowledge). But when the ancestors of mankind left the Garden of Eden and entered a land that needed to be conquered with effort and torment, there they found animals. They were already, perhaps voluntarily, waiting for them outside the borders of the Garden of Eden (where they also encountered the problem of free will, which was pointless in the Garden of Eden). Because people were not deprived of power over all earthly things, including animals. Once an accompaniment and ornament in the park, to their detriment they were given a new purpose - they became prey and food. Rabbit is returning to the Croatian Post stamp. As spring returns to our lives. This peaceful animal, a bouncing ball of fur with twitching nostrils and long and bendable ears, was present as a symbol and code in all ancient cultures, not only in terms of unrivalled reproductive rate, i.e. fertility and the renewal of life. As such, the rabbit followed various mythical gods and all the goddesses of love - the Egyptian Thoth, the Greek Aphrodite (but also Artemis who protected rabbits), the Roman Venus, the Norse Ēostre, Holda and Freya. Due to the fact that the rabbit resides underground, he was also associated with notions of the underworld, that is, the afterlife. Among all the symbolic contexts, perhaps the most beautiful and closest to Christianity is the one found in Buddhism. Namely, it is said that when the Buddha was hungry, the rabbit threw himself into the fire and offered himself as food. How did the rabbit get the egg? According to the myth, the goddess Eostre saved the frozen bird from death by dressing it in soft fur and turning it into a rabbit. Out of gratitude, that creature gives an egg as a gift to Eostre every year. The custom of giving eggs as gifts has been passed on to humans, primarily children. The connection between the rabbit and the egg was mentioned in Germany already in the sixteenth century, and is dated and documented in the doctoral dissertation of a young German physician, Johannes Richier in 1682. He dealt with the harmful effects of eating colourful Easter eggs with which people decorated houses and gardens for Easter Sunday. Painted eggs as an element of Easter iconography have spread from Germany around the world and thanks to the rabbit continue to delight us to this day. Easter, the greatest celebration in the Catholic Church, sums up the meaning of faith. It is a feast with two sides. One is inevitable death, sorrow and darkness relativized by Christ’s acceptance. The other is the hope of the infinity of life and the promise of its renewal. We live in a time of unexpected difficulties. We are infected and shaken. The prospect of a better world is subject to escape and fog. We are in need of joy and its images. That is why the rabbit returned to the Easter stamp of Croatian Post. A little rabbit among the bright flowers. He came back to remind us of the Garden of Eden that he would enter more easily than us, for he had probably come out of it for us. For that purpose, we will only need some free will. academic Željka Čorak